V. I. Lenin

On the Declaration by the Polish Social-Democrats at the Zimmerwald Conference{1}

Written:Written in July 1916Published:First published in 1962 in Vol. 30 of the Fifth Russian edition of theCollected Works.

      Printed from the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 41,

      pages380.2-381.1.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
      © 2004

      Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
      terms of theGNU Free Documentation License.

ThisP.S.D. declaration at Zimmerwald shows that in opposing the right of
nations to self-determination, the Polish Social-Democrats wish to say something
quite different from what they are actually saying. They want to say that not
every movement for national independence deserves Social-Democratic
support. That is unquestionable both because any democratic demand is
subordinate to the common interests of the proletariat’s class struggle,
without being at all absolute, and because in the epoch of imperialistrivalries to dominate the nations there may well be open and secret
alliances between the bourgeoisie of an oppressed country and an oppressor
country.

{1}This was a protest against the oppressive policy of the tsarist
autocracy, and the German and the Austrian governments, who, “depriving
the Polish people of the possibility of deciding its own future, regard the
Polish regions as a pledge in the forthcoming game of compensations....” =

“This is an especially gross expression of the essence of the policy of
the capitalist governments, who, while sending masses of people into the
slaughter, arbitrarily determine the future of the peoples for whole
generations.” The Polish Social-Democrats expressed the conviction that
only the participation in the imminent struggle of the revolutionary
international proletariat for socialism, “a struggle that would break the
chains of national oppression and abolish all forms of alien domination,
will assure the Polish people as well the possibilityof an all-round development as an equal member of the union of nations”.

Thedocument published here was written by Lenin on a separate sheet
and is apparently a variant of the corresponding passage from his article
“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up”

(see present edition, Vol. 22, p. 348).

p. 380